by Helen Kitson
‘What about me, then?’ I said, furious at her lack of sensitivity. ‘One A, one B, three Cs. How do you think I feel when you go all drama queen over one lousy subject?’
She apologised, but after that things changed for a while. I’d always known she was clever, but now I resented it. Most of all, I found it hard to accept the marks she got for English, since she claimed she never did more than skim our set texts. She even talked about reading English at uni. I fell in love with the books we studied, but my marks rarely hovered above average. It simply wasn’t fair! She was my best friend, I loved her, and I couldn’t bear the fact that I wished, more than anything, for her to be ordinary.
And then there were the boys. In that respect our relationship was the classic combination of beautiful girl with plain girl in tow to take up the slack. Madeleine had her pick; I was lumbered with the best friends who, if they were kind, liked me for my personality or, if they were cruel, gazed at her while they caressed me.
Her boyfriends were a heady mix of high achievers and bad boys. She got through them at quite a rate and only a few stick in my memory. The bad boys left a deeper impression than the clever ones, because they were generally nicer to me.
She was the reckless girl who’d happily go the whole way, I the timid girl who would go so far but no further. Sometimes we compared notes. Sometimes we got down to business with our respective partners side by side. She always got the bed, I’d be on the floor. Bra pushed down, tits out, zip undone, my hand clasping a stiff dick like it was an ice lolly. Watching Madeleine out of the corner of my eye, her head thrown back, lips parted, one leg dangling on the floor. Yet I don’t think sex meant much to her beyond the relieving of a simple need, and love was a word that never crossed her lips. When a relationship ended she was rarely upset for more than a few days, her misery prolonged only if the boy concerned decided to blab about how “easy” she was, and many did.
‘Am I a whore?’ she once asked me. The question took me aback, left me speechless. ‘I don’t want to be known as the village bike,’ she added.
‘Why do you let them, then?’
She frowned, gazing at the green foil strip of Microgynon pills she held in her hands. She’d just shown me where she hid them in her bedroom, her parents having no idea what their daughter got up to. Years later, when I watched the BBC production of I, Claudius, I was struck by a line spoken to the amoral Messalina by her lover. He accused her of wanting to crack the world apart just to see what would happen. That’s what Madeleine was like.
Despite her “wild child” tendencies, she was essentially a nice, polite girl. Teachers liked her. She didn’t show off or arse-lick and, her maths GCSE meltdown notwithstanding, she was modest about her abilities and achievements. She also did her best to encourage me to go to uni, which I’d decided against. My grades were unlikely to be good enough to get me into the university of my choice and I wasn’t prepared to settle for second, let alone third, best. I had no idea what I was going to do once I left school and I could hardly bear the prospect of being parted from Madeleine, but she was destined for great things and places to which she would travel without me.
‘You should be a writer,’ she told me. ‘You love books so much. More than I do.’
‘I’ve no talent.’ Never again had I shown her any of my hard-won, disastrous poems and stories, and she’d never asked.
‘What do you want to do, then?’ Not that she had any idea what her eventual career might be. In those days, if you had a degree in any subject, lots of doors automatically swung open for you. Anything I might have enjoyed doing required a degree, and Madeleine was probably right to scorn my stubborn refusal to consider studying at one of the minor universities.
‘A degree’s a degree,’ she’d say. ‘Who’s going to care what class it is or where you got it?’
‘But I’d know.’
‘I still don’t understand why you think it’s better to have no degree at all than a poor one.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘Tell me, then. Explain it to me.’
How could I? The world was split open for her; she took from it whatever she chose, whereas I could feel my choices narrowing. I wasn’t clever enough; I wasn’t talented enough.
‘I wish I were more like you. I wish I were you!’
A strange look came into her eyes when I said this. Sadness; a kind of fear; a soft wince of pain. Envy is often misplaced, but when I looked at her I saw a glowing golden girl who would win all the prizes.
‘Are you happy?’ I asked. ‘With your life – with what you think your life will be like, after?’ I meant after university, but I could easily imagine her staying on, gaining a PhD, becoming the sort of brilliant academic whose appeal is so great she finds herself the darling of the press, of television, of popular culture.
‘I think I’d like to ask the cards.’
She kept her Tarot cards, a Rider-Waite deck, wrapped in a pale green square of silk that had belonged to her grandmother and still smelled faintly of the old lady’s Coty L’Aimant. I sat on her bed and watched her shuffle the cards, her eyes closed, chin tilted upwards. Cut and cut again. Ten cards arranged in the Celtic Cross spread. I doubt she really believed in this hokum any more than I did, but often it gave her consolation: a sense that fate could be manipulated if one knew the hazards to avoid.
The card representing “final outcome” was the one that interested us the most. Sometimes she used the whole deck, sometimes only the major arcana, and today – with the whole deck to choose from – she’d picked the sun card as her final outcome.
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Yes; it’s a very positive card.’
‘Then why do you look so glum?’
She glanced up. ‘Do I? Maybe I wanted more. The High Priestess. The Lovers. Something… Oh, well.’ Roughly she pushed the cards together, returned them to the deck. ‘It doesn’t really mean anything, does it? You can’t cheat fate.’
I had no idea what was bothering her. I was the one with the uncertain future, the probability that my life would be swallowed up in some awful, menial job that I’d resent. I snatched the cards from her, decided to ask them to guide me, to tell me simply whether or not I should follow Madeleine to university.
‘The Tower.’ Madeleine picked up the card to examine the picture. A stone tower struck by lightning, a golden crown falling from its apex. ‘It means you have to destroy the fortress you’ve built around yourself, not lock yourself away like an anchorite.’
‘Anchoress,’ I softly corrected her. Two people fell headlong from the tower, suspended for ever in mid-air.
‘It’s all nonsense, isn’t it? You can interpret the pictures any way you want.’
True enough, and I don’t for one moment ascribe anything that happened later to warnings we should have heeded from the cards, but I did have a sense when I looked at the tower that I had accepted my fate without quite knowing what that fate was.
In the weeks leading up to our final exams, Madeleine decided to stop seeing the boy she’d been going out with for several months.
‘I can’t afford to be distracted,’ she told me. ‘I can’t stomach the idea of hanging around waiting for re-sits.’
Less bothered about the outcome of my exams, I became a sort of surrogate lover, meeting Ben for coffee, going to the pictures with him, allowing him to slip his hand up my t-shirt while we watched the film. He often talked about Madeleine, missing her, berating her, telling on her. I reminded him she was my best friend, I didn’t want to hear him badmouthing her, but I wondered at some of the things he claimed she’d done. How could she? Did she have no sense of self-preservation, no self-respect? Was there a core of self-destructiveness in her nature? Why else would she have agreed to play strip poker with three young men?
‘We cheated, of course,’ Ben said, his smile half apologetic, half callous. ‘We got her naked, but then she took fright, darted off and hid behind the sofa, crying
until we gave her clothes back.’
It could have been so much worse had they not been essentially decent young men, but the question remained – what possessed her to do such things? When I tried to ask her, she got angry – with Ben for sharing the information and with me for listening.
‘How could I not listen? I didn’t know what he was going to say!’ I’d been doing her a favour, hadn’t I, in taking him off her hands?
Her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Soon I’ll be away from this stinking place, away from little people and their small minds.’
Was I included? ‘You did it, then? He wasn’t lying?’
She shook out her long hair, dark and dull, in need of a thorough wash. ‘It was just one of those stupid things you do. Someone had a bottle of wine. I don’t even know how to play poker. I’d forgotten all about it.’
Ben hadn’t. I doubted the other lads had, either. And neither could I. The image of Madeleine crouching behind a sofa, the young men teasing her, refusing to hand back her clothes immediately, hurt me. For all her brilliance, all her beauty, she was terribly vulnerable. Compared with her, I was slow-witted, dull, a dud rocket to her spinning Catherine wheel, but I had my tower, my fortress of thick bricks, and I’d wall myself up sooner than allow myself to plunge into the starry vastness.
Chapter Six
Simon hadn’t heard of Barbara Pym, so before I went to work I plucked my copy of Excellent Women from the bookshelf and handed it to him.
‘You’ll probably find it quaint. No vampires or murders.’
‘Sounds refreshing. I prefer books that feel as if they needed to be written, not those with one eye on the bestseller lists.’
‘You’re not interested in writing a book that makes a lot of money, then?’ He was young enough to be in love with the romantic idea of suffering for one’s art, but also young enough to feel that riches were his due. At that age, you rarely write unless you’re fairly sure you’re going to produce a masterpiece. Or perhaps that was simply me being romantic about youth.
He grinned. ‘You know what they say. Money might not buy you happiness, but it’s more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes than on a bike.’
‘I’d best get off to work. I thought we might go out for a drive somewhere this afternoon.’
‘Oh yes – your little car.’
‘Not exactly a Mercedes, but still.’ A beige Fiesta, in fact, the sort of car garage mechanics like to call a “good little runner”. I hadn’t forgotten that Simon claimed to be researching Mary Webb and I’d compiled a list of places associated with her. For all I knew that had been another lie and he had no interest in Mary Webb at all.
My car was a luxury. I didn’t need it to get to work and its one regular weekly outing was to the supermarket. Even that I could probably have managed on the bus. Madeleine and I both learned to drive as soon as we turned seventeen, for the vague reason of “independence”. My parents bought me a second-hand Mini to learn in, but Madeleine – despite the fact her parents were wealthier than mine – had never wanted her own car.
‘Can you drive?’ I asked Simon.
‘I have a licence, but no car. I don’t like owning stuff, makes me feel too responsible. A car’s just something else to worry about and spend money on.’
‘Speaking of money, presumably you’re aware it doesn’t grow on trees. If you’re going to stay here for a while, would you be willing to make a contribution to your food?’
‘God, yes, why didn’t you say?’ He pulled out his wallet from a back pocket and presented me with five tenners.
‘Exactly how long are you intending to stay?’
‘Just a few days, then I promise I’ll leave you in peace. If that’s okay with you?’
I left him sprawled on the sofa with the Barbara Pym novel that, I suspected, he would hate. Timid people leading more or less timid lives. Would he get the irony or would he find the characters and their concerns utterly perplexing in their ordinariness?
Today I viewed Mr Latham with a jaundiced eye when I took his lunch in to him. Doubtless he saw me as an excellent woman, although I didn’t quite come up to scratch where church activities and volunteering were concerned.
‘How is your young man settling in?’ he asked.
‘He’s not my young man.’
‘Oh, I didn’t mean – Good heavens, I never meant to imply any kind of improper liaison.’ He unwrapped his cutlery and spread the napkin across his lap. How comfortably he would have fitted into one of Pym’s novels.
‘He’s bought a typewriter. He wants to write a novel.’ As I spoke the words, I knew that Simon intended to stay for longer than a week. But why? All right, he’d had a ruck with his parents, but he must have had other relatives or friends he could have stayed with. It made no sense that he should prefer my company to that of friends his own age, and there were few arguments so insurmountable that parents wouldn’t be glad to see their child, however difficult or annoying he was, once they’d had a few days to calm down.
‘I don’t suppose I’ll see him in church – will I?’
‘I never questioned him about his religious beliefs.’
‘In any case, I should like to meet him. Bring him round one afternoon if you wish. Not that I mean to pry, but it’s always nice to see a new face.’
Bored with the old ones, are you? I thought. And probably he was simply curious to see the person who was staying with me. I would have been, in his place.
‘Thanks, I’ll ask him. I thought I might take him for a drive this afternoon. He’s studying the books of Mary Webb.’
‘Oh, good. Plenty of places of interest, then.’
‘Sorry. You want to get on with your lunch in peace.’
He chuckled and sliced into his poached egg. ‘I must say, I am rather peckish. And do, please, bring young, er—’
‘Simon.’
‘Simon, yes. Any time.’
I couldn’t begin to imagine what Simon would make of Mr Latham. We were relics from another age, the vicar and I, and not even an age we had personally known.
As soon as I got home I felt I must explain Mr Latham to Simon, but he’d drifted to sleep on the sofa, the Barbara Pym novel open, face down, on his chest. He couldn’t have read much beyond chapter three. And oh, how beautiful he looked lying there, the sun kissing him, the sun allowed…
‘Simon!’
He took his time regaining consciousness, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘Sorry.’ His voice thick, sticky with sleep. ‘The sun always makes me drowsy.’ He removed the book from his chest, marking his page with a Post-it note. ‘And how was your vicar today?’
‘He’s not my vicar. I don’t even go to church.’
‘Don’t you?’ A frown. ‘Is it quite right for a vicar to have a heretic cooking his meals?’
‘I’m an atheist, not a heretic. I don’t hold beliefs strong enough to qualify as heresy.’
‘Has he never tried to convert you?’
‘Don’t be frivolous.’ I went to the kitchen to make a pot of tea.
‘Sorry.’ He stood in the doorway, his hair dishevelled, t-shirt shapeless from having been washed too many times.
‘What for?’
‘For taking the piss. No one in my family ever bothered with religion. It’s like a different world. Well, it is a different world, isn’t it? God, the Devil.’
‘I never speak to Mr Latham about religion. It would hardly be wise.’ I put down the tea infuser and gazed at him. ‘We know nothing about each other, do we? The essentials, I mean. The things that are important to us.’
‘Finish making the tea, then come and sit down. We’ll talk. I want to know you, properly.’
‘What about our drive? I was going to show you some of the places connected with Mary Webb.’
‘It can wait. I think we should talk first.’
He wandered back into the living room. I wasn’t sure what to think. Pleased, for a start, that he hadn’t frowned at the mention of Mary Webb,
so I assumed that part of his story wasn’t a lie. Confused by this wish to “know” me – what did that mean, exactly? We get to know people gradually. We make a special, concerted effort to do so only when the person concerned is a potential partner. That couldn’t be the case here.
Only occasionally did I miss Russell, but to lose a golden person like Simon would be a far heavier blow. In slow motion I finished preparing the tea, wondering – most pointless of exercises – how to avoid falling in love with him. It wasn’t something I wanted to happen, but how did one elude such things?
‘Is this Earl Grey?’ he asked.
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak on even so banal a topic.
He leaned forward, his eyes – his beautiful blue, blue eyes – gazing straight into mine. ‘Well?’
‘Well?’
‘All right, let’s start with your job. How did you come to be doing something like that?’
A safe topic, and something I didn’t mind talking about. ‘I needed a bit more money, simple as that, and as I have few qualifications and little practical experience—’ I shrugged. ‘It was either that or work in an office. I was a typist after I left school. It bored me stupid.’
‘Go on.’
‘What else is there? I wanted something part-time in more or less pleasant surroundings. I like it.’
‘It’s suitable. Writers shouldn’t have careers.’
‘I’m not a writer.’
‘You have the soul of a writer.’
‘Even proper writers have to pay the bills.’
‘Yes, but they should take jobs they don’t have to think about. Writers need to dream, to breathe, if they’re to create anything worthwhile.’
His idealism was understandable. I was perhaps not much better, since I’d never had a family, never had to handle the day-to-day responsibility of running a home in any meaningful way. Who cared about the dust? Not me and certainly not Pushkin.
I’d brought out cups – it seemed wrong to drink Earl Grey from a mug. He handled the dainty cup well, not fumbling it or drinking in the slightly camp manner some men affected. Perhaps if I could think of him simply as a potential friend, all would yet be well.